The Unknown Known - Die Agenda des Donald Rumsfeld

Famously rigorous filmmaker Errol Morris sits a subject in front of him and the subject won't budge. This is, unfortunately, the takeaway from this documentary - a tremendous disappointment of a film in some way, but an extraordinary documentation of psychosis in another.

Rumsfeld apparently so annoyed Morris with his crafty replies that the director felt it necessary to follow up his film with a wild press tour apologizing for it - including a four part investigation into Rumsfeld's evasiveness in a New York times op-ed. In another article he called this film 'a horror movie'.

And it's understandable. Those who were against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be infuriated- it gives us no new answers as to the motives behind the wars, no candid insights into Rumsfeld's tenure, and instead presents us with the same smirking blur of a man that we all got to know from his press conferences. Without a glint of uncertainty in his eye, he repeats essentially the same shtick as he always has. Direct questions are deflected with a grin and a wave.

Indeed, nobody deserves to be investigated more than Rumsfeld or his former compatriots, and Morris would ordinarily be the man to do it. But for an encounter to take place between two people, both need to be there. In this case one was absent. Those expecting a one on one - a whittling away towards the real substance - will leave empty handed because Rumsfeld is a ghost. There ain't nothing there. We've all been punk'd.

Errol Morris tackles another former United States Secretary of Defense in Donald Rumsfeld with an in-depth interview. It starts mainly on the invasion of Iraq but covers his entire Washington career and his personal life. The Iraq stuff is not anything new especially if one had paid attention. Rumsfeld is as evasive as ever. His earlier work for previous Presidents holds some interest inside stories. The obvious comparison is Errol Morris' masterpiece "The Fog of War". In that one, Robert McNamara is much less a politician and more of a wise elder lamenting mistakes. That is a much more compelling watch. This one is an extended Sunday morning political talk show and a simple biodoc of Rumsfeld's career. Errol Morris' views are obvious from his questioning. The history is informative but nothing shocking. Maybe in another twenty years, Rumsfeld will have something more interesting and surprising to say.

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know." This was the enigmatic quote from American politician Donald Rumsfeld that inspired the title of this interview by acclaimed documentary maker Errol Morris. Rumsfeld had an astonishing career working for no fewer than four US presidents and serving twice as Secretary of State for Defense - once as the youngest holder of the position (1975- 1977) and then later as the oldest holder of the post (2001-2006). In his second term as Defense Secretary, he was a principal architect of the so-called 'war on terror', sending troops into Afghanistan and then Iraq.

The fascinating testimony presented by Morris is both written and oral. Rumsfeld was famous for his blizzard of memos - known as "snowflakes" - and Morris managed to gain access to all the unclassified ones and to persuade Rumsfeld to read out the most relevant to the documentary. Additionally Morris posed a series of searching questions in an interview shot over 11 days and recorded using the film maker's trademark "Interrotron" device which means that Rumsfeld is seen staring straight into the camera. It has to be said that Rumsfeld is a fluent writer and an articulate speaker and, after eight decades, is as sharp as ever, so there is no revelatory moment like David Frost's interview with Richard Nixon, but it is precisely his evasiveness and the charming manner in which he accomplishes this that is so revealing of a bizarre and (when given power) frightening character.

I saw "The Known Unknown" at its UK premiere in central London's Curzon Soho cinema in the presence of Errol Morris who made some opening remarks and then, after the screening, took a question & answer session. He compared this documentary with "The Fog Of War", his 2003 interview with another US Defense Secretary when he questioned Robert McNamara on the Vietnam war, and called the two films "bookends". He noted that McNamara was "deeply reflective", but characterised Rumsfeld's performance as "deeply unreflective". He called Rumsfeld "a skillful obscurantist" who was "obsessive with language" and had "a complete lack of irony", highlighting his "infernal grin".

The banality of much of Rumsfeld's language - "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence" - reminded me of Peter Sellers' penultimate film "Being There" (1979) in which he played a simple gardener whose bland aphorisms about nature led to him being co-opted by America's political power brokers. Morris has done us a service in capturing all this for history in the hope that we can learn from history. What is totally unclear is why Rumsfeld agreed to the interview. This was Morris's last question to him and he responded: "I'll be darned if I know".

Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, and his Lifetime of Service to War

The Unknown Known is the latest documentary from Errol Morris. Like his interviews with Robert McNamara in his film Fog of War, he interviews another architect of war, this time the Second Iraq War.

Unlike former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who pushed a continuation of the Vietnam conflict when he was in office, Donald Rumsfeld is not apologetic about his role in sending Americans off to die overseas. In his book In Retrospect, McNamara states in Time Magazine, "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

Rumsfeld has no apologies to make, according to the man himself. And he learned no lesson from Vietnam except, as he would say, "it was a failure of imagination" that we lost in Vietnam.

Even Nixon apologized about his mistakes when talking to David Frost.

I am sure Director Morris was under legal contract not to ask tough, direct questions of Rumsfeld. Thus, he let Rumsfeld indict himself. Rumsfeld is narcissistic and unapologetic about the Second Iraq War. He sees no wrong in making the U.S. strong militarily regardless in how that strength is used. He does not, in The Unknown Known, see that the Second Iraq War was based on lies at all. He sees no lies. He submits that Saddam Hussein and Iraq did have WMDs, we just couldn't find them. He believes the U.N. weapons inspectors were duped and needed to keep looking. He does not agree that water boarding is torture, no matter what Human Rights Watch and others say. He sees know wrong except in our "failure of imagination."

Rumsfeld is a master of Newspeak, using phrases like "peace through strength", and "weakness is provocation." This all comes out in the movie, and it was no surprise to most of the audience. He lives in a world of lies, and the person he deludes the most is himself. Rating: Rent it. It is worth a view, and I would love to say that you should see it multiple times.

But there are no dramatic revelations in the movie, no sense of awaking. In fact, the lesson is that a beltway insider has many ways to deny the suffering of others, especially those we kill thousands of miles away for no cause. Rumsfeld sees war not as a destination, but a journey. As long as the U.S. stays on that journey, he is happy.

Peace, Tex Shelters

There's something maddeningly chaotic about Donald Rumsfeld's logic in terms of US international policy. When he was in press conferences during the Iraq War under W Bush, Rumsfeld's answers to tough questions often rang of the so-called "double-speak", a term which is associated with but not explicitly used in George Orwell's "1984". He would respond with other questions or make unfunny jokes. He would use strange metaphors. Rarely did he simply answer direct questions. Errol Morris' documentary about Rumsfeld is strangely similar. He has Rumsfeld do most of the talking, and what comes out of the former Defense Secretary's mouth is a barrage of inconsistencies, untruths, and illogical conclusions. In short, Rumsfeld's whole way of thinking is a jumbled incomprehensible mess. And yet, he was one of the most powerful people in the W Bush administration during the first decade of the 21st century. You could argue W Bush had flawed judgment, Dick Cheney was immoral, but Rumsfeld is in his own realm. As Morris said in an interview, he was one of the most "self-deceiving" people he had ever interviewed.

The format of the documentary is one of the strangest you'll ever see in a film of this type. The subject himself is the narrator. He narrates and then comments on the different subjects covered in the documentary. He occasionally answers questions posed by Errol Morris who can be heard in the background. One of the former Defense Secretary's most interesting phrases is "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", a phrase coined by Carl Sagan when referring to the unknown realms of outer space. Rumsfeld is famous for composing 1000's of email memos, and recurring throughout the memos are his definitions of particular words and terms which are displayed on-screen. The film traces his childhood, his early years in politics under President Nixon and briefly under Gerald Ford. He was an adviser for Governor Reagan and later for President Reagan and George Bush Senior. Most of the documentary concerns the Iraq War and his tenure as Defense Secretary under George W Bush.

One example which highlights Rumsfeld own self-deception and denial is when Morris asks about the public perception concerning Saddam Hussein after the 9/11 attacks. Rumsfeld in the documentary claims people knew that Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The documentary then cuts to a Rumsfeld press conference clip of 2003 in which a reporter quotes Saddam Hussein: "I would like to tell you directly we have no relationship with Al Queada." Rumsfeld's reply: "And Abraham Lincoln was short." The reporter than asks Rumsfeld to respond to Hussein's statement and the Secretary of Defense simply says that Hussein "rarely tells the truth". The implication is clear: Rumsfeld wants the public to believe that Hussein and Iraq contributed to 9/11. If you read between the lines, and realize what is unsaid rather than said, Rumsfeld never actually states that Hussein is lying about having a relationship with Al-Queada. He makes the Lincoln analogy joke and he says that Hussein has a pattern of lying, but never once did Rumsfeld himself directly accuse Hussein of lying about having a relationship Al-Quaeda. This is the kind of double-talk, doublespeak which is how Rumsfeld's reasoning seems to work.

People have criticized the documentary as raising many more questions than it answers. This may be the point of the film. Rumsfeld comes off, at best, as a completely self-deceived person whose rationalities have no logic, and at worst an amoral international leader who got us into an unjust war. His logic, we "lacked imagination" to see the Japanese coming when they attacked Pearl Harbor and thereby justifies the War in Iraq. As Morris points out in an interview, if we can imagine our enemies doing anything in the future, then we can rationalize military operations for almost any reason at any time.